Question

Hi all,

Something I really miss from other DAWs is smart disable of effects to save on CPU. On my laptop i can run out of real-time CPU quickly.

This feature would include:

Audio detection-based disabling of plugins in the style of FL Studio - when the channel is silent or drops below a certain level, the DAW automatically disables the effects freeing up CPU. A selectable threshold would be nice too.

An per-channel (or global) option to automatically disable all plug-ins on the mute of a channel, as happens in REAPER. This can cause a delay when un-muting, but having the option would be great for high-cpu effect racks.

This whole feature would be very useful for people working on non-optimal systems, which is probably most users.

At the moment, one can be running with muted or silent channels hogging vast amounts of CPU

Answer 1

The easiest way to go about it is put the effects you really need as Event Fx and render. Saves up a lot of CPU. I use a Intel Celeron Processor 2.41 GHz and 2GB HDD and using that process i can make monster scores with up to 110 to 120 tracks. i hope it helps.

Answer 2

From my experience with Reaper doing this, I could often drop my CPU usage by 90% just by clicking that option in the settings. That takes about 3 seconds to do. Rendering all the Events with FX would do the same thing, but take a lot longer to do. I just tried it in my current project where only 8 events had fx, and it said it would take 36 minutes to render. So, no. Not an equivalent workaround.